your community engagement toolbox

Your community engagement toolbox

CitizenLab is the all-in-one platform for public engagement. Reach your community using a wide set of methods, manage their input efficiently, and

receive automated insights to better inform decision-making.

Collect new ideas, receive feedback on your plans, gather votes to gauge support, or organise online workshops. All in one place.

CitizenLab is an impact-driven company providing governments with an online engagement platform. The user-friendly platform enables you to centralise and manage all consultation projects in one place.

How it works

1. Engage your community

2. Manage their contributions

3. Decide based on insights

Seamlessly moderate all comments, process community input, and collaborate with your team.

Save time processing inputs and gain a granular understanding of citizens' needs, using our integrated insights tools.

About CitizenLab

Easy-to-use platformA modular toolkit with a superb user experience. Launch your new projects in just a few clicks.

Powerful back-officeWe understand that every context is different. The admin tools give you full control to customize the platform and manage it efficiently.

Text analytics & insightsAs community input keeps flowing in, save precious time processing all data thanks to our AI-powered reporting module.

Online workshopsCombine the best of both worlds and host face-to-face workshops within your projects to reach group consensus.

What’s so unique about CitizenLab?

The town hall for the digital era

+200

+2,500

+500,000

8 Awards, including the World Summit Award in “Government and Citizen Participation” in 2020.

Governments of all sizes. A fast-growing network of forward-thinking governments in different countries.

Projects in all policy domains: from urban transformation, over climate action, to mobility.

Citizens. That’s what drives our team every day: amplifying citizens’ voices on topics they care about.

1

ENGAGE

Pick from a complete toolbox of engagement methods

All your projects, in one place

Timeline

Information

Events

Project overview

Proposals VolunteeringParticipatorybudgeting

Ideation Online workshops

MappingQ&AOptionAnalysis

Quick Polling

SurveysInformation

Keep all your engagement projects in one central place. Use the ‘Folders’ feature to organize projects logically.

Add attachments, images, video, and text to inform your community.

With

in e

ach

proj

ect

List all past and upcoming related events, incl. online workshops.

Build your own process using one or more engagement methods and set expectations.

Consult Involve Collaborate EmpowerInform

2

ENGAGE

Ideation

Online workshops

Highly interactive discussions

Ideas, comments, votes

Moderate & give feedback

With the timeline on top, video integration on the left, and workshop interactions on the right, you have the tools you need to facilitate the conversation.

Script your own workshopA complete facilitator’s toolkit. Add steps to your workshop, break all participants up into smaller groups, and pre-define the interaction method at each step.

Bring your public meetings online and host workshops to deliberate on topics. In combination with other methods, workshops are most powerful to deepen the conversation face-to-face and find group consensus.

Use the user-friendly ideation method to collect large volumes of input on your platform, and complement it with live, face-to-face deliberation to reach group consensus.

The engagement method at the core of the platform. Ask a question and tap into the collective intelligence.

• Rich idea form with topics, location, attachment, and image as metadata;• Interactive discussions through threaded comments, mentions, and votes;• Social media sharing and notifications to boost engagement;• Configurable idea fields and topics per project;• Disable/enable idea posting, commenting, voting per phase;• Allow for a limited number of votes per phase, or disable downvoting.

Share timely feedback with your community, either all at once through status changes, or individually through official updates.

• Statuses per idea (e.g. new, considered, accepted), fully customizable;• Official updates that stand out from all other comments;• Spam reporting and profanity filters for easy moderation.

Featured Methods

FOR CITIZENS

FOR CITIZENS

FOR ADMINS

FOR ADMINS

• Jitsi video integration with admin controls to mute all, disable video, go full screen;• Present pre-defined questions through polls, collect ideas and gather votes;• Ask group facilitators to summarize their break-out room’s discussion.

• Use countdowns at each step to indicate how much time is left;• Switch between break-out rooms to check how each conversation is going;• Export all workshop data to Excel, and save hours on transcribing post-it notes.

3

Proposals

Volunteering

Participatory budgeting

Mapping

MethodsENGAGE

Crowdsource bottom-up proposals, outside of your projects. The voting threshold and deadline will help you understand what’s most important.

• Configure your voting threshold (e.g. minimum 100 votes required);• Pre-define the next step if the threshold is reached (e.g. feedback by council);• Require identity verification and consider votes as digital signatures.

Allow your community to drop pins on a map and source location-specific input. Add layers to inform the public and steer the participation.

• Upload your custom map layer as a shapefile on top of the OSM base layer;• Set the perimeter within which the community can share input;• Configure the zoom level and let participants browse through the map.

Create a space to coordinate volunteering actions. Useful to activate your community in the implementation of projects.

• Coordinate the volunteering work and pre-define the actions; • Gather a list of volunteers for each action;• Once volunteers have signed up, communicate about what’s next.

A great way to gamify public participation. Let your residents allocate funds to different community initiatives using knapsack voting.

• Assign a budget to each initiative on the ballot;• Pre-define how much can be spent within the participatory budget;• Set your currency or work with a points system.

4

Polls & surveys Identity verification

Option analysis Q&A

MethodsENGAGE

Propose a set of options to your community, and let them deliberate and decide on their favorite proposal. The way to get feedback on your plans.

• You propose the options, the community shares their comments;• Limit the number of votes and disable downvoting;• Collect comments about preferences and analyze the argumentation.

Ask a short list of questions via polls, or set up a survey for more complex cases. A proven way to easily engage your community.

• Compose a simple list of questions via the polling feature;• Combine with identity verification and use polling for referenda;• Native survey integrations with Typeform, Google Forms, Enalayzer;

Ask your community to verify their identity before they get full participation rights. Use the available integrations with ID brokers or generate unique codes.

• Integrate with your local ID broker (e.g. itsme, FranceConnect, DigiD, NemID);• Upload a list of verification codes or generate random ones;• Create a group of verified participants and grant them extra rights.

The Q&A method helps you gather specific answers to the questions you ask. An easy method to engage your community interactively.

• Answers are shown in a list view, making it easy to explore the contributions; • Answers consist of just a title, no description. Engagement in two clicks;• Receive notifications as a moderator when new answers are in.

COMING SOON

5

A powerful back-office for efficient collaboration

Communication tools

User management

• Upload a list of email addresses and send out invitations; • Send targeted email campaigns to a specific user group;• Embed pre-built widgets on your homepage;• Enable automated emails to keep users in the loop.

Create manual groups for a fixed set of members;Create smart groups, dynamically updated based on a set of conditions (e.g. lives in X, interested in Y);Permissions: restrict access to certain projects when you need to engage a specific group of users;Roles: collaborate with colleagues and make them project manager.

Idea management

Explore all input: filter ideas per project, topic or status, and sort by number of votes.Assign ideas to colleagues and let them share feedback via status changes or official updates;Move ideas to the next phase in the project.Moderate all new input in the Activity overview.

Platform settingsStyle the platform following your brand guidelines;Define what extra user data you want to collect;Customise the platform and define what areas and topics should look like;Our helpdesk guides you to the right answer if you cannot find it immediately.

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6

MANAGE

AI-powered analytics to extract actionable insightsWe use natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze textual input and show you the community’s main priorities. Segment by demographics to better understand the diversity of opinions.

Platform dashboard Project reports• Follow the activity on your platform• Analyse demographics of participants• Receive weekly admin reports per email• Export all platform data to xls and csv

• Generate AI-assisted summary reports per project• Auto-detect key topics and group the input accordingly• Get automated suggestions to write project conclusions• Share your report with both colleagues and participants

7

DECIDE

✓

✓✓✓✓

✓

✓✓✓✓✓

✓

Accessibility

Privacy & data processing

Security

Hosting & maintenance Quality control & performance

8

Compatible with all common browsersFully responsive on mobile & tabletMultilingual accessibility in +15 languagesKeyboard navigation and accessible via screen readersGuidance on a contrasting color paletteContinuous accessibility testing in development

Compliant to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) v2.1 level AA

GDPR compliance

Specs sheet

Certified by third-party accessibility auditor AnySurfer

Currently developing the Information Security Management System (ISMS) in accordance with the ISO 27001 guidelines. Certification will be completed in Q2 2021.

All users can:

Our absolute priority to guarantee digital inclusion.

The highest standards to protect all personal data.

Edit all personal data in their user profileRequest to remove their profile and personal dataRead our accessible privacy policyDisable cookies to avoid specific data processingDetermine which emails they want to receive

All users can:

ORM layer for database access to prevent SQL injectionsIndustry standards for authentication (e.g. JWT tokens)All communication encrypted under HTTPS TLS 1.2+All database storage encrypted at restNo XML usePolicies to determine if user role can perform actionSeparate staging and production environmentsBack-end cleans all user input that can lead to XSS attackUse of simple serialized formats (JSON)Continuous integration auto-alerts vulnerabilitiesReal-time logging system to detect anomalies

Advanced security management on OWASP top-10 risks:

Third-party audited on compliance. Your organisation remains data owner and can export all data at anytime. All data sub-processing happens within the EEA.

Cyber Essentials certified

ISO27001 in process

• Uptime guarantee for >99,9%• Regional server & data hosting• Storage on ISO27001 certified AWS data centers• DNS and SSL configuration by CitizenLab• Daily back-ups, kept for 30 days• RPO of 24h and RTO of 2 hours

• Automated test coverage of +85% on all source code• Error detection by a runtime error tracking system• Auto-monitoring of memory usage and processor load• Auto-scaling at heavy peak times• Multiple servers distribute the work dynamically• Annual penetration tests to ensure security standards

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TECHNICAL

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To address Vancouver’s housing crisis, we

have implemented an annual tax on empty

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called the Empty Homes Tax...5 potential scenarios for the

commercial center

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1 month remaining

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called the Empty Homes Tax...New Central Park

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pour but d'offrir un nouvel espace de dialogue citoyen partic

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développer la démocratie locale et à construire une ville pour tous. L’ambitio

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Ensemble, préservons notre cadre de vie et agissons pour notre Ville de demain !

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commercial center

140

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called the Empty Homes Tax...

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ipant à


n est de placer les


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Projects

Citizen Initiatives

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commercial center

Ideas

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your community engagement toolbox

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